Wheatgrass Part 1

[Swamp Gas]

Interesting Story. Notice Andrew Weil, putting down Wheatgrass. Weil is a big advocate for vaccinations. Also, the Massachusetts attorney general suing Ann Wigmore. Can't have anything compete with Oral Diabetes Medicine and Cancer Industry cash cows?



The Elixir Series Part III
Wheatgrass and San Francisco's true believers



By Amy Moon, Features Editor, SF Gate

Tuesday, August 3, 2004


Once upon a time in San Francisco, there was a happy farm with a red barn and trays of grass growing in the sunshine behind it. It sat right across the street from the Valencia Gardens projects, but this gritty locale didn't stop a steady stream of customers from stopping by Eva Moen's Wheatgrass Farm and Depot for their daily dose of "green sunshine."

Today, the little red barn is boarded up and the cheerful fellowship of wheatgrass-juice aficionados has faded away, but the substance itself has come into a new phase of popularity. Although the history of this potent green fluid is -- like that of all true elixirs -- full of supposed miracles and replete with true believers spreading the gospel to seekers of cures, many of today's wheatgrass-juice guzzlers are regular folk who don't know anything about magic and care only about what the brochure at Jamba Juice promises: that it helps cleanse and detoxify your blood, contributes to making your skin look great, assists in digestion, aids in metabolizing energy and fat and helps bolster your immune system.

But, behind its current vogue simply as a healthful drink, there still exists a community of worshippers who believe wheatgrass can save each of us -- and the world, too. Going back before Eva Moen and continuing to the present, wheatgrass believers are alive and well in the Bay Area, and talking to them makes one wonder whether there really is something to this heady stuff that might change one's life forever, or whether it's just the latest in a long string of health fads and snake oil.

One cannot talk about wheatgrass in the freshly squeezed form we know today without referring to the pioneering efforts of Dr. Ann Wigmore. After using wheatgrass juice to cure herself of various ailments, including gangrene and cancer of the colon, Wigmore opened the Hippocrates Health Institute in Boston in 1963. Many among the tens of thousands of people who passed through its portals report being healed of all manner of diseases by her Living Foods Lifestyle, based on drinking wheatgrass juice and eating a raw-food diet.

Wigmore's life mission was to share the Living Food Lifestyle with everyone in the world. She believed that, as she said, "as each person becomes cleaner inside and detoxifies mentally and emotionally, one will be led naturally into wholesome activities that will better nurture oneself, others and the earth."

Out here in San Francisco, though, it was Eva Moen who brought wheatgrass to the people, and she carried Wigmore's legacy forward with the community she gathered around her.

Moen was a charismatic figure, described as a 6-foot-tall Amazon of Norwegian extraction in her late 50s who claimed that wheatgrass cured her of her alcoholism. She was said to have the strength of a man and the energy of a someone less than half her age. In its heyday, during the mid-1990s, her Wheatgrass Farm and Depot -- the main supplier for the entire Bay Area -- produced hundreds of trays of wheatgrass a week.

San Francisco filmmaker Donald Harrison is one of the many people who regularly stopped by Moen's establishment. Initially, Harrison says, he visited the place to research a film about obscure businesses, but he was immediately drawn in by the passion of the people who frequented the farm. "I was struck by how the place was like a church or house of worship," adds Harrison, who is also assistant director of development and marketing for the San Francisco-based Film Arts Foundation. "There was a cultlike fanaticism about the people. Most had been fighting illness and saw wheatgrass as part of their savior."

"Grass People" is now the working title of his film. And, even though he stumbled across the farm after Moen had already gone and the farm was in its decline, Harrison started communicating with the elixir's advocate through letters and heard second hand about her strong presence. "Eva Moen is a wheatgrass evangelist, a true believer," says Harrison. "She is very much into God and believes that wheatgrass is part of what could bring about world peace and could end world hunger."

Harrison adds that the wheatgrass community consists of two distinct groups: people recovering from illness who use it to treat their disease, and others -- like yoga instructors and marathon runners -- who are committed to being extremely healthy. "So, you have this combination of people on both sides of the health spectrum coming together and learning something," he says. The people he met at the wheatgrass farm were genuine and openly friendly, he adds. "I always walked away feeling like I had made a real connection."

Moen influenced many people who were drawn in by her positive energy and her belief in the healing powers of the juice. Lisa Bach, founder of Juicy Lucy's, a pioneering all-organic juice bar and restaurant that opened nine years ago in North Beach, says Moen taught her everything she knows about wheatgrass juice. "She turned me on to it, and she showed me how to juice," adds Bach.

Bach had come back from a three-month yoga hiatus with Ashtanga yoga guru Pattabi Joi, and his edict continued to ring in her mind: "Do your practice, and all good things will come." She quit her corporate job, even though she was six months pregnant, and opened her café, but her connection to Moen pulled her further along her path.

"Just being [at Moen's] and being in the presence of the grass was amazing," Bach says. After a 20-day cleansing diet of 6 ounces of wheatgrass juice per day, she adds, "I never looked better -- I never felt better. It brings up all the toxins in the body. What's stored in your organs are emotions."

The long-haired, exotic-looking Bach, clear eyed and alive, says she runs on vitality. Of wheatgrass juice, she adds, "Only until you have it in your body can you understand what it's like. I can spin circles around any 20-year-old, and I'm 45. I get younger as I get older." Bach believes that drinking wheatgrass changes you. "You let go of a lot of stored things within you," she says. "You become radiant. Your eyes are brighter. It gives you mental clarity. You see clearly and think clearly."

[Swamp Gas]

Whenever someone walks into her groovy, purple-walled café with a mural of Green Tara, a female Buddha and meditational deity -- she brings in all good women, Bach tells me, "only goddesses" -- Bach approaches them with the greeting, "How about a shot of energy?" and gives them a swallow of wheatgrass juice in a pottery bowl. She turns to me and smiles, saying, "I can steer anybody to drink anything. Who's going to say no to that? Besides, they're just going to turn around and thank me." She laughs happily and adds, "It's a natural high."

Bach's speech is a grab bag of catchy sound bites about wheatgrass: "You bring grass into your surroundings, and you feel the energy." "It takes you up and never lets you down." "Life without grass is no life at all."

Bach's energy is infectious, and one wonders what, exactly, this stuff is that can make a person high on life.

On a basic level, wheatgrass is a young wheat plant -- generally red winter wheat, hard spring wheat or soft spring wheat -- cut down and juiced in the grass stage and generally imbibed in 1-ounce or 2-ounce shots.

It is one of the so-called green superfoods, those comestibles containing an abundance of vitamins and minerals, and, according to various documents, 1 ounce of wheatgrass juice is nutritionally equivalent to 1.5 to 2.2 pounds of fresh vegetables. It is said to contain 70 percent chlorophyll, which is often referred to as the plasma of plants -- similar to hemoglobin, the oxygen- and iron-rich factor in our blood -- which adherents claim makes wheatgrass juice extraordinarily nourishing and healing.

Some hardcore fans drink up to 6 ounces a day. Others use it as a gargle, as a hair rinse, on cuts and bruises and even for enemas. Proponents claim wheatgrass cleanses the lymph system, builds the blood, removes toxins and promotes vitality.

Others claim it can cure cancer and diabetes, abolish high blood pressure and mitigate any number of other diseases and poor health conditions.

Although reports of the myriad benefits abound, there are detractors as well. The most prominent is esteemed natural-healing proponent Dr. Andrew Weil, who says about wheatgrass, "Unfortunately, despite its wide popularity, there's no evidence to back any of these [health] claims. And I don't recommend its use other than as a source of minerals and vitamins. If you like wheatgrass and it appeals to you, fine -- drink it. But I don't think it's a substitute for 2.5 pounds of vegetables. Besides, I don't like the way it tastes."

According to the American Cancer Society, there is no scientific evidence to back claims that a wheatgrass diet will put cancer into remission. Furthermore, in 1982, the Massachusetts attorney general's office sued Ann Wigmore for claiming that her program could reduce or eliminate the need for insulin in diabetics. Afterward, she retracted her claims.

But anecdotal evidence suggests that wheatgrass juice is doing good things for many people. Douglas Farrow, who owns Jucy's, a juice bar in Oakland's upscale Rockridge District that sells (in addition to smoothies and freshly squeezed juices) a lot of wheatgrass juice, says that fully one-third of his customers are in recovery from a major illness such as cancer or AIDS.

But, Farrow adds, his customers run the gamut. Wheatgrass juice can be part of a healthy lifestyle, or it can be a counterbalance for a more "toxic" one. "People who are anything but holistic still come in and get their wheatgrass juice," he says. "It's good for smokers because it mitigates the effect of smoking." If he's noticed any particular trend, he adds, "it's mostly middle-aged people hedging their bets, preventing disease before it happens."

Farrow, a youthful 54-year-old with an 8-year-old child, a 1 1/2-year-old toddler and a baby on the way, says wheatgrass juice gives him the energy to keep up with his family and work 2 1/2 jobs. "Without wheatgrass, I couldn't do it," he says. "What sold me is seeing people in recovery coming back again and again."

Lisa Bach, too, says that now that wheatgrass has become trendy, her customers come from all walks of life. "People use it to move what they eat unconsciously out of their body," she says. "An ounce a day keeps the doctor away."

According to Filmmaker Harrison, the wheatgrass community is multicultural too: "There's a Nigerian guy in Oakland who runs an Eboda juice shop, an Egyptian family in the Sunset who sell it [at Daily Health, next to Le Video on 9th Avenue], and Eva, who's Norwegian. The woman who inherited the farm after Eva was Latina, and I think she had lived in the projects. The crack dealers that would come by from the projects would say, 'I know this is for white people, but let me try some -- maybe it'll help me.'"

Wheatgrass has certainly moved beyond the fringe and made inroads into the mainstream. People line up at Jamba Juice for it. The Safeway store on Solano Avenue in Albany sells organic wheatgrass plants in its produce section, next to the lettuce. Urban Forage, a raw-food café, has just opened its third outlet in San Francisco, and other restaurants and juice bars offering wheatgrass juice are proliferating in the Bay Area and beyond.

Scientists such as Dr. Yoshihide Higawara, who owned one of Japan's largest pharmaceutical firms and dedicated 30 years to researching the chemical composition of wheatgrass juice, verify its high vitamin and mineral content. And, so far, in and of itself, it doesn't seem to have done anyone harm. (However, wheatgrass that hasn't been grown properly or has been refrigerated is susceptible to a mold that can cause nausea and allergic reactions in drinkers.) But how does one account for the many amazing cures attributed to it?

"I believe a lot of it has to do with your belief," says Harrison. "If you believe this is helping you, then that is part of it. It's what Dr. Andrew Weil calls an active placebo. It's believing in something that is doing something to you."

If that principle applies, then, is the substance itself so important? "I think, in certain cases, someone could heal themselves with a cheeseburger," Harrison adds. "I think a lot of it is the mind-set."

And that's where the importance of the wheatgrass advocate comes into play. "I do think, with these things, that it's important to have this person who's such a cult figure, or somebody you're going to believe," Harrison says. "I think that's part of why Eva was so important for the wheatgrass community here. She believed in it, she knew everything about it and she would introduce people to it in a way that they would get the full benefit."

Bach, probably Moen's most fervent disciple, says, "Eva and I were soul sisters. Her door was open for everyone. She had the biggest heart.

"After Eva left," adds Bach, "the spirit of the grass left." Bach continued to buy wheatgrass from the person who took over Moen's farm until the business went under, and then for awhile she quit altogether.

Bach now obtains her wheatgrass from Twin Sisters Farms, in the Sonoma County city of Fairfield, run by her friend, Hollin Zimmerman. At Twin Sisters, which Zimmerman claims has the perfect climate for growing wheatgrass, she plays classical music and uses only purified water on their plants. The resulting grass is lush and green.

True believers say wheatgrass takes on the energy that surrounds it and has a life force of its own. "A lot of people that I met at the farm would talk about that," says Harrison. "Some people would say, 'When I come here and drink the grass -- not anywhere else but here -- I feel like I'm drinking in something spiritual,' or, 'I'm drinking in love' or, 'I'm connecting with some higher power through it.'"

During the process of making his film and interacting with the community, the healthy and clear-eyed Harrison says, "I became a believer. For someone who grew up on junk food and fast food, it was a big change."

Now when he talks about wheatgrass, Harrison voice becomes passionate. "I really do think there is the possibility for wheatgrass and other things to really catch on, because I think there's such a void of spirituality in our media and in our lives these days," he says. "So much food is processed and fake and scientifically experimented with that, for people to start to experience things that are real and natural, I think it's important for our planet. I really do."

[Mech]

I will believe DR. NORMAN WALKER, vegetarian, (wheatgrass and juicing advocate, colon expert) (Lived to be 118 years old)... before I will believe the San Fransico COMICAL.

The ONLY things you have to watch out for in wheatgrass production/consumption is if #1. You have an UNHEALTHY intestinal tract (the S#!Ts will insue) OR #2 If you let MOLD and MILDEW get on the sprouts.

If you are careful with the soils sterility..this should be no problem.